Key to the family. Thomas and Oliver.

Key to the Family was created as part of a series of works, which dealt with systems of ordering and memory. The work speaks of our attempts to make sense of relations and to find some order in the world. Whilst these systems reflect strategies of order, the structures and formulation of thinking remain idiosyncratic - always simply a slither of experience. Key to the Family is a small archive of memory, consisting of samples of hair collected of Millers twin boys over 13 years: 1997 - 2011. Every cutting is labelled with the date and arranged in years. The ‘shelves’ of hair are stacked in a hinged box – suggesting that one is able to close it. This becomes a metaphor for private space of a mother’s memory of her children, of the personal space of tender grooming. Key to the family is therefore a nostalgia of a time past and for the artist the process of making became a tangible memory of her family.

The work also speaks of a system of residue from ancestors – hair being the container for DNA of multiple lines of family. Ironically one’s knowledge of your forebears is extremely limited and in that sense the decision to have children is a gamble with the unknown. Key to the family is also the ideal to order and contain some understanding of the place in a personal history, place that is essentially beyond your control.

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